Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (66 page)

“Was it him who?” Jilly asked, then laughed at the way her question sounded.

“Izzy met Vincent Rushkin on the steps of St. Paul’s yesterday,” Kathy said with the sort of pride in her voice that Izzy had always wanted to hear coming from her parents. “
And
he invited her to his studio this morning.”

Jilly’s eyes went wide. “You’re kidding.”

“Not to mention,” Kathy went on, “that he wants her to study under him.”

“You’ve
got
to be putting us on.”

“Nope,” Kathy said. “Choira might be giving her a hard time, but her talent’s not going unappreciated where it counts.”

Izzy was embarrassed to be in the spotlight. She also felt she had to defend Professor Choira, who taught both Jilly and herself life drawing.

“Professor Choira just thinks I’m spending too much time on detail,” she said. “And he’s right. I’m never going to learn how to do a proper gesture drawing until I loosen up.”

“Yeah, Choira’s not so bad,” Jilly added. “At least he knows what he’s talking about.”

Kathy gave a disdainful sniff.

“Enough with Choira already,” Alan said. “Tell us about Rushkin. I don’t know the first thing about him except that his work is brilliant.”

Izzy felt her mouth opening and closing like a landed fish as she tried to slip a word into the flurry of Jilly’s questions. But she knew exactly how Jilly was feeling. If their roles had been reversed, she would have been pressing Jilly for as many details, if not more.

“Well, he’s overbearing,” she said. “A bit of a bully, really, but he …”

Her voice trailed off as her memory called up what Rushkin had said to her about his desire for privacy concerning his private life:
The art speaks for itself … to allow a view of any other part of
myself relegates the art to secondary importance.
Looking up, she found three gazes fixed expectantly upon her, waiting for her to continue.

“Actually, he’s a pretty private person,” she said, knowing how lame this sounded. “I don’t really feel right, you know, gossiping about him.” Jilly rolled her eyes. “Oh,
please.”

“I got the feeling that he doesn’t want me to,” Izzy added. “It’s as though, if I do talk about him, or what goes on in his studio, he won’t ask me to come back.”

“You sound like you took a vow of silence,” Kathy said.

“Well, not in so many words. It was more implied …”

“This has all the makings of a fairy tale,” Alan said with a smile. “You know, how there’s always one thing you’re not supposed to do, or one place you’re not allowed to go.”

Jilly nodded, getting into the spirit of it. “Like Bluebeard’s secret room.”

“God, nothing like that, I hope,” Izzy said.

But thinking of the story Jilly had been referring to reminded her of how she’d basically spent the morning in a state of barely-controlled fear, not just because of who Rushkin was and how much she respected his work, but because he could look so terribly fierce, as though any moment he might come out from behind his easel and hit her. She gave a nervous laugh and then managed to change the subject.

No one seemed to mind. But she had cause to remember that conversation later.

VI

So what made you clam up about your morning with Rushkin?” Kathy asked as the two of them walked back to their dorm together. “I thought that if it really did turn out to be him, you’d be so excited that none of us would have been able to get a word in edgewise.”

“I was embarrassed.”

“About what?”

Izzy shrugged. “Well, for one thing, I didn’t learn anything – no, that’s not right. I did learn a couple of things by watching him work, but he didn’t
teach
me anything. He just had me posing for him. That’s all I got to do.”

“He’s doing a painting of you?”

Izzy nodded.

“Well, that’s a real compliment, isn’t it? Immortalized by Rushkin and all that.”

“I suppose. But it doesn’t say a damn thing about my art.” Izzy glanced at her friend. “I just felt so awkward. I mean, I knocked on his door and he didn’t even say hello or anything, he just told me to take my clothes off and start posing.”

Kathy’s eyebrows went up.

“Don’t even say it,” Izzy told her. “It was strictly business.” She pulled a face at the thought of Rushkin touching her. “But it felt, I don’t know. Demeaning.”

“Why? You don’t think the models in your life drawing class are being demeaned because of what they’re doing, do you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“So what was the problem?” Kathy asked.

“I don’t know how to explain it exactly,” Izzy said. “It’s just that I got the feeling that he wasn’t painting me in the nude because he was inspired to paint me so much as that he wanted to humble me. He was establishing his control.”

“Power tripping.”

Izzy nodded. “But it wasn’t a man-woman thing. It went deeper than that. He talked a bit about elitism – in terms of art – but I think it’s something that touches all aspects of his life. You know he never even asked me my name?”

“Sounds like a bona fide creep,” Kathy said.

“No,” Izzy said. She took a moment to think about it before she went on.

“It’s more as though so far as he’s concerned, he’s the only thing that’s of any importance; everything else is only considered in how it relates to him.”

“Lovely. You’ve just given me the classic description of a psychopath.”

“Or a child.”

“So do you think he’s dangerous?”

Izzy considered the fear she’d had to deal with the whole time she’d been in his studio. In retrospect, Rushkin’s attitude had presented her with more of an affront to her own sense of self-worth than any real sense of danger.

“No,” she said. “It’s just disappointing.”

Kathy gave her a rueful smile. “Well, I can see why you’d be disappointed, especially considering how much you love his work. That’s the trouble when you meet famous people sometimes – they’re all wrong. They turn out to be everything their work would never lead you to expect.”

“But maybe we’re at fault as well,” Izzy said. “Because we’re the ones with the expectations.”

Kathy nodded. “Still, you don’t have to like him to learn from him, do you?”

“Well, it would sure make things easier.”

“Nothing worthwhile is easy,” Kathy said; then she grimaced. “Who thinks up those sayings, anyway?”

“Storytellers, like you.”

“You can’t blame me for that one.”

“But it is true,” Izzy said.

Kathy nodded. “So what are you going to do?”

“Well, I think I should be able to juggle my schedule so that all my classes are in the afternoon.”

“By this, do I take it you’re going to keep going to his studio?”

Izzy smiled. “Well, I’ve got to let him finish my portrait, don’t I? And he did say he’d start showing me things after it was done, so I should give it at least that long.”

“Good for you,” Kathy said.

VII

Newford, October 1973

“No, no, no!” Rushkin cried.

Izzy cringed as his gravelly voice boomed in the confines of the studio. “My God, you’re hopeless.”

She’d been coming to the upper floor of the coach house every morning for a month now, and while she herself had seen a marked improvement in the quality of her work, even in such a short space of time, she had yet to win one word of praise from her teacher. So far as Rushkin was concerned, she could do nothing right. She’d gotten worse, rather than better. She wasn’t even fit to clean a real artist’s brushes, or sweep up his studio – both of which were tasks she performed for him every day, as well as making him lunch, fetching his groceries and supplies, and running any number of other errands.

“What can you possibly be thinking of?” he demanded. “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You
don’t
think.”

He had yet to ask her her name.

“I think a bug would be more able to follow instructions than you.”

“I … I was trying to do what you told me …” Her voice trailed off at the withering look he gave her.

“You were
trying,
were you? Well, if this is the best you can come up with when you’re
trying
then perhaps you should be considering some other career.
Anything
but the arts. Anything that doesn’t require you to have the half a brain you need to follow a simple set of instructions.”

He tore the canvas from her easel and flung it across the room. Izzy watched in dismay as it struck a pile of Rushkin’s own canvases and they all went tumbling to the floor. Ignoring the clatter and possible damage to his paintings, Rushkin picked up the new canvas that Izzy had primed earlier this morning from where it leaned against the legs of her easel and set it up between the trays where the other had been. He grabbed the brush from Izzy’s hand.

“Look,” he commanded, pointing to the mirror that he’d set up in front of her easel the day before.

He pushed her forward so that her own reflection was prominent. “What do you see?”

“Me.”

“No. You see a person, a shape, nothing more. The sooner you stop relating what you see to what you think it should be and simply concentrate on the shapes and values of
what
you are seeing, the sooner you’ll be able to progress.”

He fell silent then. Studying her reflection for a few moments, he began to build up a figure on the canvas with quick deft strokes. Three, four – no more than a dozen – and Izzy could see herself, already recognizable, her own image looking back at her from the canvas. She looked as though she was standing in a cloud of mist.

“Now what do we have on the canvas?” Rushkin asked.

“Me?”

The brush moved again in his hand, adding darker values to the hair and skin tones, highlighting the idea of a cheekbone, exaggerating the shadow that held an eye.

“And now?”

The familiarity was gone. With two strokes he’d changed the image of her into that of a stranger.

But oddly enough, the final effect made the image on the canvas seem more like her than it had been only moments before.

“This
is what you want to find,” he told her. “Use what you see as a template, an idea, but draw the final image from here –” He tapped his head. “– and here –” Now he laid a hand against his belly. “– or what you do is meaningless. You want to paint so that the subject on your canvas is something the viewer has never seen before, yet remains tantalizingly familiar. If you want to paint exactly what you see, you might as well become a photographer. Paint what you
feel.”

“But your work’s realistic. Why should I have to –”

She never saw the blow coming. He struck her with his open hand, but it was still enough to send her staggering. Her cheek burned and her head rang. Slowly she lifted a hand to her stinging cheek and stared at him through a blur of tears.

“What did I tell you about questioning me?” he shouted.

Izzy backed away. She was numb with shock, and scared.

Rushkin’s rage held for a moment longer; then the anger that had twisted his features into an even more grotesque appearance than usual fled. A look of contrition came over them and he seemed as shocked as she was at what he had just done.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I … I had no right to do that.”

Izzy didn’t know how to respond. Her adrenaline level was still high, but her fright had now turned to anger. The last person to hit her had been a boyfriend she’d had during her last year of high school. After she finally managed to break up with him, she’d vowed never to let anyone hit her again.

Rushkin dropped her paintbrush into a jar of turpentine and shuffled over to the recamier. When he sat down, head bowed, gaze on the floor, he looked more than ever like a stone gargoyle, a small figure, lost and tragic, looking down at a world to which it could never belong.

“I’ll understand if you feel you have to go,” he said.

For a long moment, all Izzy could do was stand there and look at him. Her cheek still stung, her pulse still drummed far too fast. Slowly her gaze lifted from the dejected figure he presented to look about the studio. Rushkin’s masterpieces looked back at her from every wall and corner, stunning representations of an artist still at the peak of his career. She heard Kathy’s voice in her head, repeating something she’d said that afternoon Izzy had told her about her odd meeting with Rushkin.

I think you’re all mad. But that’s part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn’t it?

Izzy didn’t know if it was madness, exactly. It was more like living on a tightrope of emotional intensity. Many of the great artists, if they didn’t have volatile temperaments, were at the least eccentric to some degree or another. It came, as Kathy had put it, with the territory. No one forced a person to associate with the more cantankerous representatives. People befriended artists such as Rushkin for any number of reasons, understanding that they would have to make compromises. The gallery owner stood to make money. The student hoped to learn.

So Izzy had taken Rushkin’s verbal abuse, because the trade-off had seemed worth it. He might be overbearing and self-centered, but God, could he paint. And even if she was no closer to winning his approval than she’d ever been to winning the approval of her parents, she was at least learning something here, which was more than had ever happened at home.

She would never forget the day that she was taking a break from weeding the vegetable garden, sitting under one of the old elms by the farmhouse, sketchbook on her knee. Her father had come upon her and flown into one of his typical rages. He hadn’t hit her, but he had torn up the sketchbook, destroying a month’s worth of work. For that, and for all the other ways that he tried to close up her spirit in the same kind of little box that held his own, Izzy would never forgive him.

Her attention turned from the offhand gallery of Rushkin’s work that surrounded her, back to Rushkin himself. Her cheek didn’t sting so much anymore and her shock was mostly gone. The anger was still present, but it had been oddly transferred to her father now. Her father, who, after he’d torn up her sketches that afternoon, had told her that “all art is crap and all artists are fags and dykes. Is that what you want to grow up to be, Isabelle? A man-hating dyke?”